SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1645 How This $50k MRR Company Tells You Who's Sharing Your Links on Whatsapp Private Messages
25 Jan 2020
Chapter 1: What is the background and mission of GetSocial.io?
Funded the company in 2013, measuring dark web conversation, sorry, dark social conversation, so people can track attribution. 500 customers doing about 50 grand per month in revenue, up from 25 grand just a year ago. A lot of their growth coming organically from WordPress and Shopify integrations. Cashflow positive since 2015. 700 grand raised, five people, six people based in Portugal.
Net revenue retention each year, about 90%. They're turning 36% in terms of gross revenue, turning 24% expansion. Don't know what their paid channel metrics are yet, but hoping to scale over the next six to 12 months. Hello, everybody. My guest today is Juan.
Chapter 2: How has GetSocial.io achieved significant revenue growth?
He is a 30 and the founder of GetSocial.io, a content and social analytics platform that helps companies like Adobe, AT&T, Sky News, and MTV to better understand how their audiences share their content. He's a member of the World Economic Forum as a global shaper and a board advisor at CIONet. All right, Juan, are you ready to take us to the top? I am. Thanks for having me today. You bet.
All right, so tell us what the company does and what's your revenue model. Are you pure play SaaS?
Yeah, we're pure play SaaS. We've been tweaking around the business model and the pricing model for the last years, actually.
Chapter 3: What challenges did GetSocial.io face during its early years?
We're trying to test every now and then what we can improve there. But the company is a content analytics platform, so we work with some of those companies that you mentioned. and we help them understand what their audiences are sharing on their website. So we measure one thing very specific called dark social, which is when people copy and paste links into private messaging apps.
That is misattributed as direct traffic, and we help the social media teams and the marketers better understand what that means to them. Pricing-wise, we started as a freemium model. Unfortunately, I mean, it's a two way road, but we got a lot of users, but we got a lot of users that didn't pay as well.
So for the last four years or three and a half years, we've been tweaking that model more towards the enterprise so we can do very low value subscription plans like $50 a month, $49 a month to the likes of 17, $80,000 a year, depending on the customer.
And so what do people pay on average per year today?
So I would divide on the segments.
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Chapter 4: How does GetSocial.io measure dark social interactions?
So for SMBs, they would pay something around $100 a month.
Okay.
For the enterprise customers, around $3,000 a month.
Okay. And if you look at your revenue from the past 12 months, what percent would you say is enterprise versus SMB?
Yeah. Enterprise now corresponds for about 80% of our revenue. Oh, 8-0. 8-0, yeah.
Oh, wow. Okay. That's a lot. Okay, great. Put this on a timeline for me. When did you launch the company? What year?
Yeah.
So we launched the company in 2013 as a completely different product, e-commerce focus. We built the product, went to the market, failed and pivoted in 2015 to the publishing world, to the media worlds. We'd have one feature and starting with one plan at $9 per month.
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Chapter 5: What is the pricing strategy for GetSocial.io's services?
And we went from there, from zero to 500 customers today.
Interesting. Okay. So you're serving 500. How many of those are enterprise customers?
I mean, for those 80% revenue, I would say 10 customers.
Oh, wow. Okay. So 10 customers pay you $3,000 a month. So that's $30,000 a month. That makes up 80% of your total revenue.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Got it.
At least three a month. There are some customers paying a few months more.
Okay. So if you look at your total revenue per month today, what, you're like $40,000, $45,000? Yeah, around that. Almost to $50,000, yeah. 50. Okay. That's great. Congratulations. So, okay. I'm just going to put, I'll say 500 customers, right? You're doing 50 grand a month. So on average there, we can obviously divide and get that.
But I just, I'll make a note that basically says you do have an enterprise cohort that makes up a significant chunk of your revenue. Absolutely. What's growth look like?
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Chapter 6: How does GetSocial.io retain customers and manage churn?
So if you're at 50 grand a month today, what were you at a year ago? Joao, what was revenue a year ago?
Sorry, I missed you.
Sorry.
It was. We're actually doubling last year's revenue. So we did about 220 last year. We're going to be half a million this year. So it's been 100 percent growth for the last three years now.
That's great. So if you're doing 50 grand a month, 50 grand a month today, you're doing 25 grand a month a year ago, correct? Yeah, yeah, that's correct. That's great. Cash flow positive today or no?
Cash flow positive, profitable business, five and a half people, let's say that. Where's everyone based? Based in Lisbon, Portugal.
Ah, very good. Are you bootstrapped or have you raised capital?
We raised seed round in the beginning. We waste most of it in that initial product. And once we ran out of money, we started charging customers for money. So since 2015, our customers pay our salaries and others. our costs, which is fantastic. I mean, we do have steel investors on board, but we haven't raised ever since.
Joel, how much total have you raised to date? $700,000, yeah. Okay, $700,000 in one round. Churn is critical in this kind of space. What's your churn today?
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Chapter 7: What role does content marketing play in acquiring new customers?
The bigger the website, the more we charge. Of course, there are some customers who don't have a very big website, but they have specific needs, either a specific module for their teams or something that they need or agencies, for example, for white labeling purposes, we can get a little bit more revenue by customizing the product towards those kinds of deals. That's interesting.
Mainly is the sessions per month.
Yep. And how are you getting new customers?
Content works great for us. So this thing I was initially discussing about dark social, it's still not mainstream, but we started writing about it in 2016. And All of our main brands, all of our main customers, the ones who paid us the most, came from a given piece of content, a blog post, a guest post in a known website, a white paper.
Our last white paper on Dark Social is working brilliantly for us. It brings a lot of leads, qualified leads. They want to know more about this. And then we have a solution for them. So content is the main thing for us. We don't do a lot of paid. We don't do events. It's mainly content marketing for us.
Yep. Yep. That's great. And in order to get a new kind of call it $100 a month customer, what are you spending on CAC typically?
We don't. We just wait for them. We built a lot of partnerships, integrations with WordPress, Shopify, anything that makes the installation process codeless. So people go, they find us, we have proper SEO on those platforms. We have proper reviews. They find us, they click a button, they install, they get to use the product, and then they start a trial, and then they convert.
Okay, so you don't know how to spend money to make more money. That's what you're telling me right now.
That's one of the challenges, correct. So we don't spend money on acquiring customers. We manage leads and inbound leads that come to us. Yep, yep. Two ways, yeah. So SMBs. It's a process, so we have a funnel, we have automatic conversations with them. With enterprise, we have a shorter or a short sales cycle, but it still requires a few calls.
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Chapter 8: What are the future plans for GetSocial.io regarding funding and growth?
How, let's say it's via WhatsApp. How are you getting access to WhatsApp messages to know that they're talking about Nathan Lacka's new show?
Yeah, so good question. So what we do is we tamper with all the URLs from a specific website. So let's say that you have your own page or one website. which has all the videos or all the links that you want to distribute over the web.
So what we do is we make sure that every page view is served a different kind of URL, so we can measure everything that goes out of the website and everything that comes back in. So we can bundle in a thing called dark social, everything that goes socially via copy-paste or by people clicking the buttons into channels that don't have any referrer data.
So if you go to Facebook, you will get some referrer data saying this is coming from Facebook. If you go to WhatsApp, if a link is pressed there, it's going to show up as direct traffic. With us, we are going to identify that traffic.
Yeah, the trick there is you're assuming everyone's always going to, when they talk about my new show, they're always going to use and copy and paste that exact link. When in reality, what's going to happen? Like when I converse with my friends about a new show I like, I'm saying, hey, Sam, I just saw the show on Netflix called XYZ. Go check it out.
And he'll then go on Google and type in the thing and find it. Like there's no way to track this stuff. So how much extra activity are you actually picking up?
That would be more of a listening function, which we don't do, by the way. Our target is more measuring the virality of each piece of content over private conversations, over private channels. So it's not that much the case you were explaining. It's, for example, helping editorial teams understand which of their content is speaking up in real time on private conversations.
A specific story, a specific topic, not so much listening about if people are talking about the topic.
Well, you know, but my whole point is like these darks, I mean, social is social. It's talking, right? The huge assumption you're making is that people are always going to, when they talk about my new show, they're always going to use this weird link you've put together that has all the tracking and so on. I'm just saying, I feel like that's a massive assumption.
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